World Enough and Time
by Arthur Delapore
Summary: [Time Enough At Last] One ironic twist deserves another. A oneshot sequel to one of Twilight Zone's most memorable episodes.


**World Enough and Time**

_A "Time Enough At Last" Fanfic_

At first Kitty thought it was just another mirage. There in the distance ahead of her she saw them: the rubble, the broken pillars, the shattered block of marble with the inscription PUBLIC LIBRARY writ upon its effaced surface. And there among the scattered books, the figure of a man knelt amongst the ruins.

That was when she knew that she must be dreaming. It had been days (or months...she had lost all track of time) since the terrible explosion which had turned all of the world into a graveyard of twisted metal and broken concrete. It had been a nuclear explosion; only that could account for the complete annihilation of life. It had finally happened just as the papers and the politicians had always said; and somehow, through a strange quirk of fate, she had survived it. And now -- now she had come full-circle back to where she had started.

She rubbed her eyes. Usually the mirages vanished when she did, but this one was strangely persistent: she still saw a man kneeling amongst scattered books and marble. She wondered whether she was finally really going mad. Then she shrugged and came closer to investigate.

The man -- if he was a man and not merely a figment of her own tortured imagination -- did not seem to notice her approach. He was gazing down at the broken fragments of something -- something small and made of metal and glass -- that he held in his trembling fingers.

Kitty quickened her pace, a mad hope welling in her heart that perhaps -- perhaps someone else really had survived besides herself -- that perhaps she would not have spend the rest of her life wandering alone in a maze of destruction and death after all. As she neared him, he looked up, his eyes distant and unfocused. She realised with a sudden pang that he must be blind.

"Is someone there?" he murmured. There was something in his voice that contained a quality more of broken despair than fear or surprise. She knew that he expected nothing more than the wind to answer him, for that was what he half-guessed was all that he had heard.

"I'm here, sir," she whispered. Her voice was cracked from long weeks of silence but she felt her spirit warm at having spoken to another living, breathing human upon this battered shell of a planet. For his part, he looked up searchingly in silent, blind disbelief. That was when she noticed the broken glasses that now lay useless upon the barren earth.

"Your glasses," she whispered. That was why he couldn't see, she thought -- he wasn't strictly blind, but without his glasses, the world must have been reduced to nothing more than abstract, featureless blurs. And yet he was surrounded by all these books...

"I meant to read all of this," he said, a smile faltering upon his face. "Before, there was always something else to do, someone to stop me -- I never had the time to. And now -- and now..." His voice trailed off and his eyes rose up to meet hers. There was a kind of hopeless defeat in them now; a resignation to what fate had chosen for him.

Kitty couldn't stand to see such a look upon any person's face; but somehow seeing it upon this man's face, a face of such gentleness, full of crushed hopes and dreams felt and unfulfilled through so many years, made her eyes prickle with tears. Kneeling beside him and taking his hands in her own, she said, "You'll enjoy all of these books, sir, just as you wanted, for I'll read every darn one of them for you if I have to. After all," she added, trying to smile, "This is, in a way, my library!"

He looked up at her, his face a mixture of bewilderment and hope. "What do you mean?" he quavered.

"I worked as a librarian here," she explained. "I was down in the basement of this place in the special collections area reading some of the weird incunabula they had stashed away when the bomb fell -- that's how I survived. But never mind all of that," she continued, warming to her new theme. "Let's find a book for you."

Noticing an old black-bound book nearby (clearly an Arkham House publication), she picked it up and started thumbing through it. It was a book of poetry and the first lines of verse that the volume fell open to were these:

_O face upturned to alien splendors!  
Sybil, what visions have you seen  
In haunted worlds? what music hearkened  
In Edens hushed and vespertine?_

_The far is near, the near is distant  
For you that dwell in dreams untold...  
And yet...and yet...perchance not wholly  
Their riddled meaning lies unrolled._

_Perchance your mouth is strangely wistful  
For hidden things you know not of:  
Your eyes forget, your lips remember  
Some lost and Atlantean love._

She finished and glanced back at him. His expression was one of quiet rapture and he said, gazing at the dust-swept horizon, "That was beautiful. Thank you --thank you for reading it to me."

Then his blinded eyes, now full of such hope, turned towards her and something in them made her heart quicken as it never had before.

"Who was the poet?" he asked presently.

"Clark Ashton Smith," she murmured, not really paying any attention to her own words. She drew closer towards him, then, and her lips met his -- and suddenly, it didn't matter anymore what the world, in all its madness, had turned itself into.

For the book lover Henry Bemis and the librarian Kitty Wilson were now together in love -- and also in the Twilight Zone.


End file.
